Daniel’s lungs emptied themselves as his continued scream was lost to the rushing air. He shot out of the fog and into the open night sky. Moonlight shone from above to turn the clouds silver, blurred from the rapid twisting in the air. His entire body was locked up, partially from fear and partially from the lingering stun. The only thing that broke into his consciousness was an intense pain in his clenched hand that deadened the arm.
He passed through another cloud. Time, was the first coherent word that came into his mind. He’d slowed it down before, even if he didn’t know how. Stop! Halt! he thought, no breath to speak the words. Freeze? Slow down! Nothing worked.
Daniel caught a glimpse of what was causing his pain. Lightning was streaking out from his fist from the sparkbat’s body he still clutched. It was like holding a live wire. Skin was blackening, and the worst was from the spines that seemed to project the lightning. With his muscles seized up, he couldn’t release it.
Daniel’s gaze tilted upwards as he toppled out of the second cloud. The continuous beam of lightning arced into the cloud to several points, connecting with red outlines still concealed in the fog. His arm was cast out towards them as if he were smiting the sparkbats with divine retribution. The violent spinning had slowed enough to see that the cloud above wasn’t shrinking as fast as it should be. Did I do it?
No, the speed of the descent still pulled at his burning clothes and skin. Time still flowed undisturbed, but Daniel’s fall was being arrested. The continuous electricity pouring into his arm had dulled the sensation until his eyes saw it happening. Somehow, the sparkbat’s corpse was resisting gravity while firing out an impossible amount of untamed current.
The lightning was starting to freeze his entire body again, doing little for the pain. Death from falling was replaced by slow torture. I can’t breathe. He’d been winded from the screaming and finally driven to the point of his body forcing him to take in air, only to find that he couldn’t. Guess they’ll get their lunch after all, Daniel thought grimly before the pain, oxygen deprivation, and tingling numbness forced his world to grow dark.
…
The sun was halfway to the apex of its rise when Daniel’s stuttering coughs broke the silence. He was face up this time. That was about all he had going for him.
The first bolt of lightning hadn’t hurt nearly as much as it seemed it would. The one that hit his chest had, but only now did Daniel truly feel like he’d been struck by lightning. The right side of his body pulsed with an ache, pain lingering in spots along his arm and hand and doubling when the tide resurged. There was also the feeling of something soft and gooey in his hand. Had the skin melted together?
Daniel opened his eyes and recoiled at the glare of the sun. Shielding them with his good hand, he sighed with relief as he looked at the other. The crushed remains of the sparkbat had congealed to his fingers. They were blackened and in need of immediate treatment, but permanent damage had been avoided. He hoped.
Daniel sat in the grass as he waited for strength to return to him. The large fluffy clouds of yesterday had gone and been replaced with stringier cousins. It was hardly worth guessing what they looked like. The only thing of note in the sky was a land mass a fair distance up. The island, he thought. He’d landed almost directly below it. It was quite a distance up, and from this side, the tree wasn’t visible. How am I alive?
Lifting his head, Daniel painfully looked around. The ground he was lying on broke into a sharp fall on all sides. It was another sky island, though a bit bigger and more lopsided than the original one. He wasn't sure how far he had left to to go to reach the ground, but it felt like he'd fallen a good chunk of it. The corpses of several sparkbat were littered near him, the only sign of those that had accompanied his descent. Whatever had killed them had left them more intact than the one he crushed. If any had survived, I’d be dead. Daniel gulped. There was grass here, short and manicured. A few of the tree’s twins stood together. They were the same, leafy dome and all, though that didn’t count the damage he and the sparkbats had done to the first one. There was also a calm pond below the trees. A low wooden bridge spanned the gap, floral patterns painted along the side. A bridge? Water!? Thirst budged its way to the forefront of his mind.
Standing would be a mistake, that much he could guess without trying. Daniel had enough control over his mangled arm to hold it to his chest while he awkwardly dragged himself to the water’s edge. Several of the dead sparkbats glared at him during the journey, and one was directly in his path. The corpse was intact, though the cylinder of its main body had branching burns crisscrossing around it. Overloaded?
His arm was no better. Beyond the mess of his hand, similar burns wrapped from the wrist to just under his shoulder. It would have made a fair tattoo if not for the price paid to acquire it. The sleeve of his shirt was just gone with the rest faring little better. I’ll go to a tailor after freakish lightning bats stop trying to eat me, he chided himself bitterly.
Daniel never thought he’d be the kind of person to enjoy drinking straight from the ground. Camping was straight at the bottom of his preferred activities, if he didn’t count falling from the sky. He looked at his hands, one pooling water from a murky pond and the other half blackened and coated with dead monster flesh. “I’m just a guy.” He’d wanted to say engineer, but that path had been abandoned before college.
That part of his life was painful, but thinking about it distracted him from the real pain in his arm. Of the many differences in the Brant family, the largest had been between the scion and the patriarch. Garret Brant was a man of the woods, a park ranger who had given up his eight-year tenure to settle down. Daniel knew from an early age he hadn’t inherited his father’s love of the outdoors, but that didn’t stop him from being dragged on numerous ‘adventures’ once he was old enough to walk.
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Garret had ribbed Daniel about it in the past. Claustrophobia and a preference for the indoors wasn’t strictly hypocritical, but that hadn’t stopped his father. His last trip had. Daniel’s father had been on a solo journey through the mountains along the Pacific coast when he’d just vanished. That had been four years ago, when Daniel was 18 and preparing for college. Initially, his father had pitched the trip as the final father-son outing before he left for college. He’d opened with a two-week trek, expecting Daniel to counter with 0 and compromise on one.
There just wasn’t time. Daniel was riding high on reaching adulthood, yet to realize what it fully entailed. He’d stood his ground, his father left, and had never returned. After the search was called off, the family had decided to hold the funeral near the mountains. That had meant a flight across the country. Daniel shook his head. “Not my fault,” he muttered, wincing as he’d unthinkingly stood with both of his hands and losing control of the movement. Instead of pushing himself upward, he’d thrown himself into the pond. The pain in his arm only grew worse as water aggravated the burns. “Owww,” he groaned.
There was something in the water. Something familiar? Stinging pain distracted him as the bits of monster began dissolving to reveal more sensitive flesh. At least his hand was clean. Turning his gaze back to the object, Daniel saw a rounded corner sticking out of the silt of the pond. Displeasure crossed his face as the soaked man rose and then reached down. His expression changed utterly when he pulled the object free.
My phone! Daniel turned it over in his hands. My phone? The device was different than he remembered. Its case was gone, as well as the logo. It retained its original shape, though the side was also smooth. No buttons, no camera, and no charging slot. Also no audio port, but the disappointment of missing that had come with the newer model. Without those distinguishing features it just looked like a black rectangle with one reflective surface.
Confused, Daniel tapped at the screen and it lit up. It had survived its bath at least. Rather than his normal lock screen, it projected a red word on a white background.
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Password?
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Password? Daniel’s phone had a passcode, not a password. Nothing about the device in his hand seemed right, but he had a strange sense it was his. Not that it recognized him; the device still queried for a password. It didn’t offer a number pad or keyboard, though. “217753?” Daniel asked the phone. The screen remained unchanged. Password? Daniel thought again.
In Daniel’s world, most had what could be considered a common password. Developed early and carried on through life, slightly adjusted to the whims of those who required it, the common password was used and reused for many years. Only the fastidious created entirely new passwords from scratch whenever one was needed. Daniel was not such a person. His common password was ‘Buildingblocks’. As that phrase crossed his mind, prompted by the screen’s word choice, the unlock symbol appeared. “Hey, I didn’t say that. How did you know?” He paused as more text flashed across the background before his phone fully unlocked.
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Focus v1.0
New Functions Added:
• Function: Encyclopedia
• Function: Maps
• Function: Music
• Function: Settings
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Though the lock screen had changed, his background image mercifully hadn’t. The photo was taken a year before his father’s disappearance. His home mountain range, the Appalachians, dominated the background. Framed by the distant blue and green was the Brant family. His mother, father, and two older sisters had reunited for the photo after being separated in one way or another.
Kara, his mother, was in her scrubs. When she had to work, the hospital took a lot of her time. That day she’d come home late despite their plans and had decided to just skip a change, since scrub bottoms weren’t entirely different from sweatpants. While the extra hours were a pain, what she made as a doctor provided for the entire family. The twins Alex and Ami, three years ahead of Daniel and in their college sophomore year at the time, had made the then scandalous decision to attend rival institutions as their sweatshirts loudly declared. They had the good kind of competitive sibling drive that pushed both of them to succeed while rarely leading to actual conflict. His father was the closest to the camera, the hike to that spot having been his idea. Daniel was in the picture too, but he rarely glanced in that direction. He hated the look of displeasure that broke through the fake smile.
It was the last good photo the family had. Normally it was more obscured, but only four squares covered the sky in the photo. “Ok wait. Wait.” Daniel pulled himself back to shore, glancing from the phone to the dead monsters on the ground, then to the sheer drop-off that ringed the island’s edge. His heart raced. “Wait.”
None of this made sense. He’d fought flying lightning fish-bats, but it was his phone that finally broke Daniel. The piece of home he’d hoped to have found had just been another reminder of how wrong things had become. How had he gotten here? What was wrong with his memory? How had he survived, and how was he now not a broken mess on the ground considering how much pain he was in?
The phone vibrated in his hand and he glanced at the screen.
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Alert: You are under Effect: Fear
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What? This thought prompted a new notification.
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For more information on Effect: Fear, consult Function: Encyclopedia
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What!?